A story

I'm kind of embarrassed to admit this, but I'm holed up in my apartment today because of excruciating lower back pain. It makes me feel very old, so I need to make sure all my readers remember that I'm still fairly young, and healthy, and active. It's a fluke. I am not falling apart in my old age.

Anyway, I can still work from home, but it's all heavy-duty-academic-thinking work, so I'm going to take a break and blog about something far more inconsequential. If it's long and rambly, I use the excuse that the pain and stir-craziness of being confined to my apartment all day is making me a little loopy.

One morning last week I turned on my car and found that the odometer read exactly 70,000 miles. This made me not want to drive anywhere for fear of ruining such a nice round number, and it made me reflect a little bit on my car and how well it's served me for those 70,000 miles. I remember when I replaced my Civic with the Mazda, I felt a sense of loss for the Civic with all its imperfections and personality quirks, but five and a half years later I love my Mazda just as much.

I have not been so successful at transferring my love from one inanimate object to another in all areas of my life. This week, the most notable failure was my alarm clock.

I got my first alarm clock in high school when I was 15 or 16, and only just replaced it. This means alarm clock #1 was with me for almost half my life. Half my life! So I shouldn't have expected it to be an easy transition. But I also didn't expect it to be hard. I'd been looking to replace the clock radio for years. It was big and clunky and gathered dust like nothing else. The clock-setting function was broken so that the only button that worked was the zoom-forward button, meaning that if I set my alarm I would inevitably overshoot my target, and therefore could only set my alarm for ballpark ranges: 7:19 if I wanted to get up at 7:15, or 5:43 if I needed to be up by 5:45 to catch a flight. And even these were only ballpark guesses at the actual time, because when I set my clock the same overshooting principle still applied. I never knew what time it actually was when I woke up in the morning.

Also, the tape deck was broken, a quality that especially shows my alarm clock's age because a) it was old enough to have a tape deck, and b) it was old enough that by the time the tape deck broke I was still at a point in my life when I still had cassette tapes to put in the tape deck.

For several years, I would occasionally browse the alarm clock section of Target or Meijer, but two things stopped me. First, I rarely use an alarm clock. I sleep so restlessly in the morning that I can be awake when I need to without any help. So a new alarm clock always felt like a want, not a need, and it's kind of a boring want to spend money on. Second, I was attached. None of the other alarm clocks on the shelves ever felt right. They had the wrong combination of functions, or the numbers were too big, too small, too bright, too red.

I used my move from Michigan to Utah as an excuse to de-clutter, and as I filled up my last box of stuff for the Salvation Army back in August, I decided to get rid of my old clock radio once and for all. I figured I could use my cell phone for awhile until I managed to find just the right replacement, and at first it felt good to have unloaded a piece of almost-junk that had been plaguing me.

But it turns out that the reason I liked my alarm clock was not for the alarm, but for the clock. After a couple weeks of not being able to tell the time when I woke up in the middle of the night without fumbling around on my bedside table and squinting to make out the tiny cell phone numbers, I finally made the trek to Target and bought myself a brand new digital alarm clock.

And I hate it. Or at least dislike it intensely. The numbers are too bright and they are the wrong color, so I tilt the alarm clock away from my bed, which solves the brightness problem but makes it hard to read in the middle of the night. The alarm is too loud (because I use my alarm so infrequently that when I was shopping for alarm clocks that I forgot that I only ever set the radio alarm on my old clock, and accidentally bought a new clock without a radio alarm), which means that if I need an alarm I just use my cell phone.

And if the alarm and clock functions are worthless, what's the point?

To top it off, this weekend I experienced the worst betrayal. For weeks, I had been looking forward to the time change on Sunday and the extra hour of sleep (or of time in the morning, depending on how you look at it) that it would bring. But much to my surprise, this little low-tech alarm clock can figure out the time change all by itself. This means that when I got up at 8, I thought I was actually getting up at 7. And I so trusted the little alarm clock not to change without my help that when my computer and my cell phone told me the truth, I denied that truth, choosing instead to spend about fifteen minutes believing the whole world had gone crazy and forgotten to change, until my reliably non-self-setting battery-powered wall clock informed me otherwise.

And then I spent a frantic half hour getting ready for church, which hadn't been supposed to happen so soon, all the while resenting my loss of the hour I had so looked forward to. Or my gain of an hour without realizing I'd gained it, which amounts to the same thing.

That kind of blows my mind if I think about it too hard.

But on the plus side, this is only one failure among many more successful transfers of affection that have taken place in the course of my move: personal computer to spiffy new school computer, blue dog-hair-covered couch to brown dog-hair-covered couch, old apartment to new apartment, academic work that I have to pay to do to academic work that I get paid to do. All in all it hasn't been such a bad transition.


And if this post weren't already long enough, I have two new book blog posts. Both of them were books I read for (different) book clubs: Fahrenheit 451 and The Help.